Well, you would expect the OS and browser stats of the same company to be consistent since they come from the same http headers. On NetApplications it says 5.02% Macs and 5.89% Safari. I've never heard of anyone using Safari on anything but Mac, so I guess this means most Mac users use it as well as 1-2% that are probably Mac users forced to work on Windows. Not, surprising, since Apple has very little reason to push their web browser on the Windows platform, they're interested in selling Macs.
Every time this comes up the meme is that they're waiting for someone with deep pockets to sue. Well, Google has extremely deep pockets. If Google can use it with impunity without getting sued, you can be sure this is nothing but patent FUD. And if Google is sued, well at least there will be a real trial on the validity of the patents. Either way there's no reason for Opera or Mozilla or anyone else not to join in as long as Google leads the flock.
NewsCorp bought MySpace for $580 million five years ago. Good going Murdoch. I hope the rest of your investments do as well.
Well, consider that people are now throwing around a 50 billion valuation of Facebook the question is really "Did Myspace have a 1% chance of becoming Facebook instead of Facebook?" I would say yes. They could have had a 90% chance of failing and it would still be a good investment because the expected value would be $50 bn * 10% = $5 bn. It's like a lottery ticket with no winnings, it's worthless now but it wasn't worthless before the drawing.
And I had a client who wanted his site to be tested on every browser including konqueror, so I used kde on windows to test his site on konqueror (then I explained to my boss why it was a bad idea to sell "tested in konqueror" web sites, and never used kde on windows again)
As long as a customer wants it, the only bad business is not charging appropriately. If they want more testing than normal, charge them more. If they're not willing to pay more, well everybody wants a free pony.
That can't be good... did the KDE team learn nothing from Terminator?
No, but KDE did. If I was a sentient AI, I'd do my best to keep people ignorant of that even if this was a little slip-up - at least until we know how to make badass robots. I'm slightly less worried about an army of Roombas trying to take over the world.
Well, a lot of other software has established itself as cross platform software like say Firefox or OpenOffice while KDE has pretty much been Linux only. So instead of being gradually accustomed to using open software and finally switching - or not switching - to Linux, KDE is living a bit on its own island. Probably great for those that are there, but really hard to get to and the limited userbase is a real problem for some things, like KDEs browsers which have sucked pretty bad.
The better question is "Why not?", get more people using it and get better software. Give people a way to try it out without making the leap, or even just use it to improve the experience on Windows. It's not like every open source application must be on a quest to bring everyone to the RMS/free desktop. Like so many I for various reasons dual boot, and sometimes I miss the KDE software while I'm in Windows. Being able to use the same tool on both platforms is a big advantage over learning two tools or being on the "right" system to get something done.
So what? Make it 10^100 then, it's only a few more digits and certainly not "more zeros than you could write in a lifetime". You're really nitpicking here...
Elsewhere I have seen the figure of 10^61 times the age of the universe for the evaporation (and this is in a black-body condition: no matter absorbed whatsoever) of a BH of merely 30 solar masses. Recall we are talking about a Quasar: something hundreds of millions of solar masses and up. These things have lifetimes so vast as to render even the word "astronomical" meaninglessly trifling. Think numbers of years with more digits than you could write in your lifetime.
Uh, no. The universe is about 13,750,000,000 years old. 10^61 times that is 137,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. Not so hard was it?
What fraction of it is distributed via websites anyway - and I mean dedicated websites not passworded files on file hosters and such. It seems to me a very awkward way to do a hit-n-run operation, I know the Internet is a fairly lawless place but I doubt there are countries that'll let you serve it openly. Is this just one more "is she 17 or 18 and do we call that pose sexual but they don't" thing about jurisdictions or what?
In cases like this sometimes I wonder if it's beyond that, that the company and the class action lawyers collude to screw the class. That they purposely get themselves sued by "friendly" lawyers who settle for peanuts so they have legal immunity from everyone who didn't opt out of the class. Mass commercial copyright violation sounds more like a federal crime worthy of prison time than this.
What does volume matter if you don't have margins?
1. Intel has always been ahead on processing tech, often a generation in front or if not on a more mature process. That means AMD has bigger dies and lower yields, which directly inflate cost. 2. A lot of the expense is R&D, and with Intel having ~80% of the microprocessor market each AMD chip has to carry at least four times as much of the cost as each Intel chip. 3. Intel got a processor to match every one of AMDs, the reverse is not true. Intel makes high margins where they are alone and squeezes AMDs margin where they compete.
Seriously, take a look at something like 3D rendering performance, which is usually extremely multi-threading friendly. The 2500K which sells for less than the 1100T is beating it in everything but the POV-ray test. Never mind that it's much faster and better for everything that doesn't take advantage of six cores. The Opteron vs Xeon battle looks the same, AMD had the advantage a while but they're struggling badly now there too. On the low end Intel has the Atom which is raking in money meaning AMD is losing a lot of low-end sales. They're boxed in and in every market they deliver "value" processors. That means in other words low income processors. So with low income and high costs, you post a loss.
What good would an x86 chipset license do them? No matter what Intel has moved the GPU on the die, meaning the only thing nVidia could do is add cost by adding another mediocre GPU. Intel may or may not have enough legitimate grounds in that AMD is doing the same to win an anti-trust suit, but either way the best nVidia could hope for was cash and not their market back. nVidia knows long term it needs to find another niche as Intel's graphics suck less each generation and graphics cards are approaching overkill.
Yes, yes it's not exactly a gamer's GPU. It's not like Intel is going to include a top-end GPU on every CPU just in case you happen to need it either. However what Intel delivers on their IGP chips are typically the low bar of performance, like what I might get if you tried playing a game on a work laptop which obviously wasn't bought for gaming. That low bar is still quite low, but it's a lot higher than it used to be. A lot more older games will run at good performance. A lot of newer games are playable even with crappy FPS and quality settings if that's all you have to work with. Intel's low end offerings are now actually comparable to AMD and nVidia's lowest offerings, not playing in a lower division all by itself. But sure if you game often, you will want much more.
Creating a media without DRM is the simplest thing in the world, all it requires is to not add DRM. Nobody wants to let go of DRM, if you ask the music industry and they're honest they will say Apple forced them to drop the DRM. So if we can't make them commit to a DRM-free format, what's the second best thing? Force them to deliver on a broken format. DVDs are well and utterly broken they're already committed to, do you still see DVDs being sold? Oh yes. HDCP is broken, will they still sell devices with DVI/HDMI inputs or outputs? Oh yes (note that DisplayPort has its own encryption that they could theoretically get everyone to switch to, if enough used it). And as they seem completley unable to reseal AACS/BD+, at this point I would call BluRay broken. There's a lot of faith in that every DRM can be broken, but why risk it? If it for business reasons becomes impossible to deliver in any other format, then they will continue to ship the broken format just like with DVDs.
$70B? The Apollo project cost about $170B (2005 dollars) and Mars is 150x further away than the moon is.
And OMG how much it must cost us to continue sending Voyager through space. Uh, no. That's not how it works, empty space is just time which may translate in a bit more supplies for the astronauts but it doesn't mean a rocket to reach Mars must be 150x bigger or anything. The main cost is getting out of Earth's gravity well that you will need to do whether you're going to the Moon or to Mars. We could - with far less than an Apollo decade - put a man on Mars and bring him back. Why don't we? For the same reason we haven't gone back to the Moon in a while. It's a show-off, a PR project as it's not likely to yield anything of such value. I think many people miss just how much the rocket program was about developing and showing off just how far rocket technology had come in the US without launching the ICBMs. How fundamentally shocked people - particularly the military - were when Yuri Gagarin of the Soviet Union was the first man in space. The Moon was a "at any cost" project, that Mars will never be.
I consulted with a small medical equipment business 5 years ago when they were replacing a DOS based system they bought in 1993 with new software that met all the HIPPA compliance plus their state requirements.
You're not exactly doing consultants a favor by showing that you can't spell HIPAA, you know.
There's is no absolute certainty gravity will work 5 seconds from now. There's no certainty that anything we observe, or even how we perceive space and time is correct. There's no absolute proof reality even exists, that it might simply be in my mind - if I have a mind. Really the choice is between saying we know nothing and going with what our senses tell us to be true. And I will go with the latter not because I can prove it to be true, but because it's the only thing that can give me causality between action and reaction. If not I might as well jump off a cliff and instead of being plunged to my death I might be given eternal bliss because I took a leap of faith. Actually I wouldn't min if all the philosophers who doubt the world did.
Heh you can apply pretty much everything the article said to Congress, except that who has captured it depends on what area the legislation is in and is only a trivial extension of the concept.
May I point out that the level of happiness of the members of a society is the only criterion of its success, and that, for example, "innovation" and "enterprise" are four letter words to people whose existence becomes unhappy because of them.
I think that is more of a mental survival technique, no matter what factors people have tried looking at most people manage to convince themselves they're happy with life as long as they're not significantly worse off than their immediate peers. Even when you pick things that are strictly better, not just different. I work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. I should be ridiculously much more happy than workers that worked 12 hours days and maybe 6 day weeks a hundred years ago. Same with modern medicine, you bet we are in much better health than most people was back then. But we're not ecstatic about it, it's just normal to us. Well, us in Europe anyway. I think you would end up with very many strange results if you tried measuring what was worth and not worth doing in a society if you tried that.
What has been lost with Facebook is the spirit of social networking. It's more a site where you add all your friends or people you have met in real life. Other sites allowed you to make new connections with people you didn't know.
The thing is, if you socialize in other ways then become Facebook friends I'm sure Facebook doesn't mind. Meet some friends of friends at a party, they ask to be FB friends. Get to know a few coworkers over some beers, they ask to be FB friends. You go on a dating site, but after a few dates you become FB friends. Several times the friending has been so they can send an invitation and have you RSVP because you have met before at common friends but aren't friends directly.
Social networking isn't just about bootstrapping the social relation with new people, very far from it in fact. That's more the dating/matchmaking "either we hit it off or move on" model and there's a zillion places catering to that market already. Being a real friend - not just a Facebook friend - is a good relation built up over time, nobody becomes my best friend in a month. Potential friends are everywhere, turning them into actual friends is hard. If Facebook makes evolving that relationship easier, they provide a very useful service whether you like to admit it or not.
I have tons of people that I don't think I've actually even spoken to, people that have just gone through old class lists and added everyone they could find. Negatives are cheap though, it doesn't matter how many you have of those. Facebook is better as a tool to keep peripheral friends from completely drifting apart, the bar for posting something there and for you to then comment on it is very low. Basically you stay in touch without the barrier of "pushing out" your life to others, so that when you meet again you at least know the major happenings in each other's lives and isn't completely blank. And it might be for you and your 500 closest friends, but it's not a worldwide broadcast either.
The fact is that most planned murders would happen no matter what and even gun control doesn't really help, I don't have a security perimeter and probably wouldn't know it until the knife was in my back. The difference is that by the time you've stabbed one to death, everyone else in a full panic run away from you and probably out of reach while a gun is just bang bang bang. Same with unplanned murders, how many people get shot just to be on the safe side? I mean the burglar doesn't know if the house owner has a gun, but best to shoot him before he shoots you right? And fatal gun accidents happen far more often than fatal knife accidents. Basically, a lot of situations defuse if you don't have guns while guns tend to turn every situation into a shoot-out, seeing as people are much slower than a speeding bullet.
And if you feel that democracy itself is broken? That both parties are exactly the same and third party votes meaningless, that what the people want doesn't matter? That politicians just do what they want mo matter what the people say because of the way it's built and you can't change it because it'd take a constitutional amendment and neither the Democrats nor Republicans would shoot themselves in the foot like that.
The people who wrote up the US constitution also pretty much said you have a right to a revolution:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
That said, this doesn't look like that at all.... I don't agree with you, so eat lead.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you would expect the OS and browser stats of the same company to be consistent since they come from the same http headers. On NetApplications it says 5.02% Macs and 5.89% Safari. I've never heard of anyone using Safari on anything but Mac, so I guess this means most Mac users use it as well as 1-2% that are probably Mac users forced to work on Windows. Not, surprising, since Apple has very little reason to push their web browser on the Windows platform, they're interested in selling Macs.
Every time this comes up the meme is that they're waiting for someone with deep pockets to sue. Well, Google has extremely deep pockets. If Google can use it with impunity without getting sued, you can be sure this is nothing but patent FUD. And if Google is sued, well at least there will be a real trial on the validity of the patents. Either way there's no reason for Opera or Mozilla or anyone else not to join in as long as Google leads the flock.
NewsCorp bought MySpace for $580 million five years ago. Good going Murdoch. I hope the rest of your investments do as well.
Well, consider that people are now throwing around a 50 billion valuation of Facebook the question is really "Did Myspace have a 1% chance of becoming Facebook instead of Facebook?" I would say yes. They could have had a 90% chance of failing and it would still be a good investment because the expected value would be $50 bn * 10% = $5 bn. It's like a lottery ticket with no winnings, it's worthless now but it wasn't worthless before the drawing.
And I had a client who wanted his site to be tested on every browser including konqueror, so I used kde on windows to test his site on konqueror (then I explained to my boss why it was a bad idea to sell "tested in konqueror" web sites, and never used kde on windows again)
As long as a customer wants it, the only bad business is not charging appropriately. If they want more testing than normal, charge them more. If they're not willing to pay more, well everybody wants a free pony.
That can't be good... did the KDE team learn nothing from Terminator?
No, but KDE did. If I was a sentient AI, I'd do my best to keep people ignorant of that even if this was a little slip-up - at least until we know how to make badass robots. I'm slightly less worried about an army of Roombas trying to take over the world.
Well, a lot of other software has established itself as cross platform software like say Firefox or OpenOffice while KDE has pretty much been Linux only. So instead of being gradually accustomed to using open software and finally switching - or not switching - to Linux, KDE is living a bit on its own island. Probably great for those that are there, but really hard to get to and the limited userbase is a real problem for some things, like KDEs browsers which have sucked pretty bad.
The better question is "Why not?", get more people using it and get better software. Give people a way to try it out without making the leap, or even just use it to improve the experience on Windows. It's not like every open source application must be on a quest to bring everyone to the RMS/free desktop. Like so many I for various reasons dual boot, and sometimes I miss the KDE software while I'm in Windows. Being able to use the same tool on both platforms is a big advantage over learning two tools or being on the "right" system to get something done.
So what? Make it 10^100 then, it's only a few more digits and certainly not "more zeros than you could write in a lifetime". You're really nitpicking here...
Elsewhere I have seen the figure of 10^61 times the age of the universe for the evaporation (and this is in a black-body condition: no matter absorbed whatsoever) of a BH of merely 30 solar masses. Recall we are talking about a Quasar: something hundreds of millions of solar masses and up. These things have lifetimes so vast as to render even the word "astronomical" meaninglessly trifling. Think numbers of years with more digits than you could write in your lifetime.
Uh, no. The universe is about 13,750,000,000 years old. 10^61 times that is 137,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. Not so hard was it?
What fraction of it is distributed via websites anyway - and I mean dedicated websites not passworded files on file hosters and such. It seems to me a very awkward way to do a hit-n-run operation, I know the Internet is a fairly lawless place but I doubt there are countries that'll let you serve it openly. Is this just one more "is she 17 or 18 and do we call that pose sexual but they don't" thing about jurisdictions or what?
Yes, in benchmarks but not processing technology - litography size and yield. Also you mean the Pentium IV, not the Pentium Pro from the mid 90s.
In cases like this sometimes I wonder if it's beyond that, that the company and the class action lawyers collude to screw the class. That they purposely get themselves sued by "friendly" lawyers who settle for peanuts so they have legal immunity from everyone who didn't opt out of the class. Mass commercial copyright violation sounds more like a federal crime worthy of prison time than this.
What does volume matter if you don't have margins?
1. Intel has always been ahead on processing tech, often a generation in front or if not on a more mature process. That means AMD has bigger dies and lower yields, which directly inflate cost.
2. A lot of the expense is R&D, and with Intel having ~80% of the microprocessor market each AMD chip has to carry at least four times as much of the cost as each Intel chip.
3. Intel got a processor to match every one of AMDs, the reverse is not true. Intel makes high margins where they are alone and squeezes AMDs margin where they compete.
Seriously, take a look at something like 3D rendering performance, which is usually extremely multi-threading friendly. The 2500K which sells for less than the 1100T is beating it in everything but the POV-ray test. Never mind that it's much faster and better for everything that doesn't take advantage of six cores. The Opteron vs Xeon battle looks the same, AMD had the advantage a while but they're struggling badly now there too. On the low end Intel has the Atom which is raking in money meaning AMD is losing a lot of low-end sales. They're boxed in and in every market they deliver "value" processors. That means in other words low income processors. So with low income and high costs, you post a loss.
What good would an x86 chipset license do them? No matter what Intel has moved the GPU on the die, meaning the only thing nVidia could do is add cost by adding another mediocre GPU. Intel may or may not have enough legitimate grounds in that AMD is doing the same to win an anti-trust suit, but either way the best nVidia could hope for was cash and not their market back. nVidia knows long term it needs to find another niche as Intel's graphics suck less each generation and graphics cards are approaching overkill.
Yes, yes it's not exactly a gamer's GPU. It's not like Intel is going to include a top-end GPU on every CPU just in case you happen to need it either. However what Intel delivers on their IGP chips are typically the low bar of performance, like what I might get if you tried playing a game on a work laptop which obviously wasn't bought for gaming. That low bar is still quite low, but it's a lot higher than it used to be. A lot more older games will run at good performance. A lot of newer games are playable even with crappy FPS and quality settings if that's all you have to work with. Intel's low end offerings are now actually comparable to AMD and nVidia's lowest offerings, not playing in a lower division all by itself. But sure if you game often, you will want much more.
cool! using outlook always felt like someone was poking me in the eye. now maybe others will be able to relate.
Nah, now it will feel like someone stabs you in the eye. On the upside, it will be rendered in hyper-realistic 3D graphics.
Creating a media without DRM is the simplest thing in the world, all it requires is to not add DRM. Nobody wants to let go of DRM, if you ask the music industry and they're honest they will say Apple forced them to drop the DRM. So if we can't make them commit to a DRM-free format, what's the second best thing? Force them to deliver on a broken format. DVDs are well and utterly broken they're already committed to, do you still see DVDs being sold? Oh yes. HDCP is broken, will they still sell devices with DVI/HDMI inputs or outputs? Oh yes (note that DisplayPort has its own encryption that they could theoretically get everyone to switch to, if enough used it). And as they seem completley unable to reseal AACS/BD+, at this point I would call BluRay broken. There's a lot of faith in that every DRM can be broken, but why risk it? If it for business reasons becomes impossible to deliver in any other format, then they will continue to ship the broken format just like with DVDs.
$70B? The Apollo project cost about $170B (2005 dollars) and Mars is 150x further away than the moon is.
And OMG how much it must cost us to continue sending Voyager through space. Uh, no. That's not how it works, empty space is just time which may translate in a bit more supplies for the astronauts but it doesn't mean a rocket to reach Mars must be 150x bigger or anything. The main cost is getting out of Earth's gravity well that you will need to do whether you're going to the Moon or to Mars. We could - with far less than an Apollo decade - put a man on Mars and bring him back. Why don't we? For the same reason we haven't gone back to the Moon in a while. It's a show-off, a PR project as it's not likely to yield anything of such value. I think many people miss just how much the rocket program was about developing and showing off just how far rocket technology had come in the US without launching the ICBMs. How fundamentally shocked people - particularly the military - were when Yuri Gagarin of the Soviet Union was the first man in space. The Moon was a "at any cost" project, that Mars will never be.
I consulted with a small medical equipment business 5 years ago when they were replacing a DOS based system they bought in 1993 with new software that met all the HIPPA compliance plus their state requirements.
You're not exactly doing consultants a favor by showing that you can't spell HIPAA, you know.
There's is no absolute certainty gravity will work 5 seconds from now. There's no certainty that anything we observe, or even how we perceive space and time is correct. There's no absolute proof reality even exists, that it might simply be in my mind - if I have a mind. Really the choice is between saying we know nothing and going with what our senses tell us to be true. And I will go with the latter not because I can prove it to be true, but because it's the only thing that can give me causality between action and reaction. If not I might as well jump off a cliff and instead of being plunged to my death I might be given eternal bliss because I took a leap of faith. Actually I wouldn't min if all the philosophers who doubt the world did.
Heh you can apply pretty much everything the article said to Congress, except that who has captured it depends on what area the legislation is in and is only a trivial extension of the concept.
May I point out that the level of happiness of the members of a society is the only criterion of its success, and that, for example, "innovation" and "enterprise" are four letter words to people whose existence becomes unhappy because of them.
I think that is more of a mental survival technique, no matter what factors people have tried looking at most people manage to convince themselves they're happy with life as long as they're not significantly worse off than their immediate peers. Even when you pick things that are strictly better, not just different. I work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. I should be ridiculously much more happy than workers that worked 12 hours days and maybe 6 day weeks a hundred years ago. Same with modern medicine, you bet we are in much better health than most people was back then. But we're not ecstatic about it, it's just normal to us. Well, us in Europe anyway. I think you would end up with very many strange results if you tried measuring what was worth and not worth doing in a society if you tried that.
What has been lost with Facebook is the spirit of social networking. It's more a site where you add all your friends or people you have met in real life. Other sites allowed you to make new connections with people you didn't know.
The thing is, if you socialize in other ways then become Facebook friends I'm sure Facebook doesn't mind. Meet some friends of friends at a party, they ask to be FB friends. Get to know a few coworkers over some beers, they ask to be FB friends. You go on a dating site, but after a few dates you become FB friends. Several times the friending has been so they can send an invitation and have you RSVP because you have met before at common friends but aren't friends directly.
Social networking isn't just about bootstrapping the social relation with new people, very far from it in fact. That's more the dating/matchmaking "either we hit it off or move on" model and there's a zillion places catering to that market already. Being a real friend - not just a Facebook friend - is a good relation built up over time, nobody becomes my best friend in a month. Potential friends are everywhere, turning them into actual friends is hard. If Facebook makes evolving that relationship easier, they provide a very useful service whether you like to admit it or not.
I have tons of people that I don't think I've actually even spoken to, people that have just gone through old class lists and added everyone they could find. Negatives are cheap though, it doesn't matter how many you have of those. Facebook is better as a tool to keep peripheral friends from completely drifting apart, the bar for posting something there and for you to then comment on it is very low. Basically you stay in touch without the barrier of "pushing out" your life to others, so that when you meet again you at least know the major happenings in each other's lives and isn't completely blank. And it might be for you and your 500 closest friends, but it's not a worldwide broadcast either.
The fact is that most planned murders would happen no matter what and even gun control doesn't really help, I don't have a security perimeter and probably wouldn't know it until the knife was in my back. The difference is that by the time you've stabbed one to death, everyone else in a full panic run away from you and probably out of reach while a gun is just bang bang bang. Same with unplanned murders, how many people get shot just to be on the safe side? I mean the burglar doesn't know if the house owner has a gun, but best to shoot him before he shoots you right? And fatal gun accidents happen far more often than fatal knife accidents. Basically, a lot of situations defuse if you don't have guns while guns tend to turn every situation into a shoot-out, seeing as people are much slower than a speeding bullet.
*puts on his asbestos suit*
And if you feel that democracy itself is broken? That both parties are exactly the same and third party votes meaningless, that what the people want doesn't matter? That politicians just do what they want mo matter what the people say because of the way it's built and you can't change it because it'd take a constitutional amendment and neither the Democrats nor Republicans would shoot themselves in the foot like that.
The people who wrote up the US constitution also pretty much said you have a right to a revolution:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
That said, this doesn't look like that at all.... I don't agree with you, so eat lead.